Single-cell and spatially resolved immune profiling in head and neck squamous cell carcinoma: a bibliometric and thematic analysis

Background Single-cell and spatially resolved technologies have expanded research on immune heterogeneity in head and neck squamous cell carcinoma (HNSCC). We examined relationships among research themes, their cited foundations, and their temporal representation. Methods Web of Science Core Collection and PubMed were searched for publications dated from 1900 through July 1, 2026. After deduplication and screening, 587 English-language articles and reviews were included. Bibliometric networks were analyzed using VOSviewer, R, and bibliometrix. Document-level cosine overlaps between keyword and reference clusters were evaluated using stratified permutations with Benjamini–Hochberg adjustment. Temporal analyses used keyword proportions and citation-weighted reference-year profiles within three descriptive windows. Sensitivity analyses examined database composition, inclusion thresholds, and individual recent references. Results Publication output increased after 2021. China had the largest publication output, while the United States had the highest citation count and international-collaboration total link strength. Co-citation and keyword analyses identified four and three domains, respectively. K3–C2 had the largest observed cosine score (0.661), exceeding its null mean by 0.039 (adjusted P = 0.0072); K1–C1 also exceeded its null expectation (adjusted P = 0.0012). Among keyword-available publications, spatial transcriptomics increased from 0.0% to 1.7% and 8.3% across the three windows. The recent reference subset contained five references, all published in 2024; its C2 share was sensitive to individual references. Keyword-cluster agreement was high across database sources and moderate at the stricter occurrence threshold. Conclusion The analysis identifies relationships among immune, cellular, stromal, spatial, and computational literature domains and descriptive changes in keyword representation. These findings provide a quantitative literature framework for further investigation of HNSCC immune profiling.